Pedro Almodovar's passion for Broken Embraces

Women on the Verge director is still the weirdest genius in cinema and now he’s fallen for his leading lady, Penelope Cruz

Film directors tend to be very nice men and very dull interviewees. Perhaps it's because they spend their days smoothing the egos of starlets and studio heads, but even the megalomaniacs are mellow in comparison to your average ego-bloated movie star, and far less likely to say something unutterably naff (how boring).

So, as I stroll into a drawing room in London's Soho Hotel, my heart sinks as I find Pedro Almodovar perched on the edge of a sofa, with a polite smile plastered across his kindly features. His puffy hair and jazzy polo shirt only add to the cutesy-grandpa vibe, and I start to panic that all the outré reasons why fans (like me) are in thrall to his work - murders, crack whores, giraffe-sized women in peephole catsuits - are a thing of the past.

The answer is no, thank God. The wilder excesses of 1980s Madrid, where young Pedro